16 ms·

What should they use? And don't say matomo until it supports drilling down byond one level.

Kovah 7y ago
In this particular case I find it very dishonest: they talk about net neutrality and privacy protection but use Google Analytics. It does not matter if GA or Matomo is the best solution, they made the decision to use GA and thus don't seem to value their customers data that much.
- franga2000 7y ago
  What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it, otherwise they wouldn't be using it - value which allows them to grow their business which ultimately benefits their users. (at least for me) Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. If you don't like it you are free to block it - hell, they literally provide a service to do so.
  - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
    What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? Matomo is good enough.
    - franga2000 7y ago
      Depends on what you're looking for. Demographic data can be really important for a business and Matomo couldn't possibly provide that.
      - pcmaffey 7y ago
        If you’re collecting and relying on demographic data than privacy probably isn’t very important to you.
      - Nextgrid 7y ago
        What is demographic data and how is it collected?
        aratakareigen 7y ago
        The age, gender, etc. distributions of the people who visit your website. I don't know anything about GA, but I'm guessing they'd know this from the currently signed in Google account.
        Nextgrid 7y ago
        What if people don't want to volunteer this information?
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        Where are you getting this demographic data? You don't get that from server logs. Sound like you're not arguing against Matomo but arguing that you really in fact do want to share data with a third party to extract information that your users very much did not consent to. It's terrifying what comes out of the wood works sometimes.
  - Kovah 7y ago
    This is not about all or nothing. This is about being dishonest in my opinion. It's like a doctor who recommends you to stop smoking because it's bad, but smokes on its own.
    - matz1 7y ago
      It's not dishonest, whether something is good or bad is never absolute. Something that is bad for someone is not necessarily bad for others.
    - franga2000 7y ago
      The doctor smoking does not invalidate their assessment that smoking is bad for you, nor does it make his other "doctoring" services less quality. For more reasons why (some/small) compromises should be allowed and not considered completely against the core value, see religious extremism.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        Sure thing, but the gigantic Google Analytics machine is hardly a small compromise versus all the other ubiquitous tracking. I don't even consider it a compromise, because literally no one arguing to use GA anyway seems to be able to present both sides of the scale considering the compromise.
    - BeetleB 7y ago
      There is no dishonesty there. Merely acting inconsistent to one's advice. It's not a serious deficiency. BTW, in a number of countries a large percentage of doctors smoke. It's a cultural thing: They pick up the habit during the stress of medical school. Would you suggest that a large percentage of doctors in those countries not inform patients that smoking is bad for them? As a politician recently complained about: Purity tests are usually a bad idea. It's fair to criticize. It's silly to reject their word/work because of it.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        Except there's no doctor-patient discrepancy, most people in this thread are in the business and actually do have to make these choices based on their own expertise in the field. It's a lot more like if all doctors were telling each other they should wash their hands before surgery, but many of them don't really because the tap water is cold and kinda too far away and everybody is doing it and what's the harm really and at least I'm not actively sneezing into the wound, you know?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it Which is why everyone uses it and we just sit back and accept the consequences. You can't be expected to be taken seriously if you simultaneously argue that other's shouldn't do something while yourself use it for precisely the same reasons everyone else does.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? It's indicative of a lack of respect for their users. > GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it That's certainly true. Also, that's orthogonal to the point. Being very valuable to website operators doesn't make its use any more acceptable to others.
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    > Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. It's not a compromise until you consider the value of both sides of the equation. Please do elaborate on that, with some details on the negative externalities of blindly sharing your tracking data with Google. Otherwise your argument just became "superior data has got some value to me, which is more than none, so yeah I got mine". It's not less of an all-or-nothing attitude if you fail to seriously consider the other side of the supposed compromise.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
They should not use anything. Or server logs, if they really must.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  It seem like most people have forgotten that before Google Analytics, we all just looked at our server logs. Sure, you can't get the exact same information, but you can get enough to do capacity planning and some basic stats. I've started to wonder why people care about Google Analytics, what does it tell you that you actually need to know. Again capacity planning is useful, but other than that, isn't sort of pointless?
  - mr__y 7y ago
    >exact same information you could actually get more from plain old log parsing in some cases. First of all with GA you can't access the raw data. With logs you can create new type of stats/metrics/charts and apply them on past data. Also, IIRC GA uses random sampling - only a % of connections are recorded and the data being shown is extrapolated from those samples. While I'm not arguing that given the vast amount of data at disposal, huge capacity and great engineers they can make those extrapolations very accurate, I'm not entirely convinced it is precise for (very) small traffic websites. And since a small traffic logging requires both small storage space and small processing capacity the resources needed for keeping and processing your own logs are insignificant while the results might be useful.
  - duckworth 7y ago
    Some of the larger website builders/hosting , e.g. Wix don’t even give you access to server logs. Sure you can setup and run your own site and CMS easily enough, but running even hourly bulk log ingestion is usually not as straight forward and the information you can derive is very limited comparative to js based tracking. Matamo ( formerly Piwik) is decent but still takes some time to setup and get right. The main thing that the analytics tells you if you are promoting anything, is which of those promotions is actually working and driving visitors to your site.
jamil7 7y ago
Nothing? why do they need analytics?
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... all of this lets a business know what they need to change/offer/stop to better serve their customers and attract more customers. I had a very niche ecommerce site for a couple of years, for ease I was only shipping to U.S. customers. I noticed that something like 20% of my traffic was coming from Canada so I decided to enable shipping to Canada but added a 5$ premium on top of the actual shipping cost. I had a sale to Canada the first hour of enabling it in my cart and Canada ended up being roughly 10% of my orders, even after I raised the premium/handling fee to 10$. Looking at my GA page once caused more money to be going into my pocket and filled a need for Canadian customers. I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable.
  - Kovah 7y ago
    My question then would be, why do you need to use especially Google Analytics for that? Stats like "visitors per country" are a core feature of all major analytics suites. I set up analytics for many site on my job and I never experienced a use case where GA offered that specific feature no other software had.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      GA is free and takes seconds to set up. Not everyone knows how to code, not everyone is a professional web dev or CS ninja, not everyone has piles of VC money to throw at such things. GA works, is well organized, and is often integrated with a lot of cart/web builder services where you simply have to plug in a short string and pop over to the GA website. I needed a vegetable knife recently. I could have (and I do have the skills, and have made many knives over the past 25 years) purchased some appropriate steel and made one myself in 3-5 hours and had it incredibly sharp but I opted to buy a Mercer stainless steel one on Amazon for 20$~ because it required much less effort. I also couldn't care less about Google or the NSA or Lectroids from another dimension tracking me so I don't rush to go "I'd better cater to the small percentage of my potential customers that want to leave zero trace on the internet, there are countless tools out there they can use to minimize that trail of breadcrumbs. This data is usable to me and Google makes it easy" and I imagine, even the company in question was like "some people want privacy but those that are concerned can easily block this with a browser extension, in their hosts file, and/or at a hardware level so we'll go ahead and use it and save a bunch of time".
CannoloBlahnik 7y ago
I’d be using GoAccess if it meant not giving up my users to Google. Matomo is a dream.
nulbyte 7y ago
What do you mean drilling down beyond one level? I use Matomo and find it just as useful as Google Analytics. Actually, I like their interface better than Google's.
Aeolun 7y ago
Simple analytics? What would they even use the data for...
class4behavior 7y ago
There are plenty of alternative solutions: Piwik, GoatCounter, GoAccess, Open Web Analytics, clicky, Snowplow, Gauges, etc. The correct solution is to self-host all analytics involving data that can be used to identify, track, or analyze individuals.
- mwexler 7y ago
  And none of these offer the ease of setup, ease of analysis, or ease of recognizing what actions to take that GA offers for $0 license and no hosting fees. These on the list are all admirable (esp. Snowplow) but all assume savvy users to be able to get things that are out-of-box with GA.
tripzilch 7y ago
> don't say matomo until it supports drilling down byond one level. everybody, this is what your privacy is worth to some people.

In this particular case I find it very dishonest: they talk about net neutrality and privacy protection but use Google Analytics. It does not matter if GA or Matomo is the best solution, they made the decision to use GA and thus don't seem to value their customers data that much.

franga2000 7y ago
What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it, otherwise they wouldn't be using it - value which allows them to grow their business which ultimately benefits their users. (at least for me) Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. If you don't like it you are free to block it - hell, they literally provide a service to do so.
- GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? Matomo is good enough.
  - franga2000 7y ago
    Depends on what you're looking for. Demographic data can be really important for a business and Matomo couldn't possibly provide that.
    - pcmaffey 7y ago
      If you’re collecting and relying on demographic data than privacy probably isn’t very important to you.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      What is demographic data and how is it collected?
      - aratakareigen 7y ago
        The age, gender, etc. distributions of the people who visit your website. I don't know anything about GA, but I'm guessing they'd know this from the currently signed in Google account.
        Nextgrid 7y ago
        What if people don't want to volunteer this information?
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      Where are you getting this demographic data? You don't get that from server logs. Sound like you're not arguing against Matomo but arguing that you really in fact do want to share data with a third party to extract information that your users very much did not consent to. It's terrifying what comes out of the wood works sometimes.
- Kovah 7y ago
  This is not about all or nothing. This is about being dishonest in my opinion. It's like a doctor who recommends you to stop smoking because it's bad, but smokes on its own.
  - matz1 7y ago
    It's not dishonest, whether something is good or bad is never absolute. Something that is bad for someone is not necessarily bad for others.
  - franga2000 7y ago
    The doctor smoking does not invalidate their assessment that smoking is bad for you, nor does it make his other "doctoring" services less quality. For more reasons why (some/small) compromises should be allowed and not considered completely against the core value, see religious extremism.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      Sure thing, but the gigantic Google Analytics machine is hardly a small compromise versus all the other ubiquitous tracking. I don't even consider it a compromise, because literally no one arguing to use GA anyway seems to be able to present both sides of the scale considering the compromise.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    There is no dishonesty there. Merely acting inconsistent to one's advice. It's not a serious deficiency. BTW, in a number of countries a large percentage of doctors smoke. It's a cultural thing: They pick up the habit during the stress of medical school. Would you suggest that a large percentage of doctors in those countries not inform patients that smoking is bad for them? As a politician recently complained about: Purity tests are usually a bad idea. It's fair to criticize. It's silly to reject their word/work because of it.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      Except there's no doctor-patient discrepancy, most people in this thread are in the business and actually do have to make these choices based on their own expertise in the field. It's a lot more like if all doctors were telling each other they should wash their hands before surgery, but many of them don't really because the tap water is cold and kinda too far away and everybody is doing it and what's the harm really and at least I'm not actively sneezing into the wound, you know?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it Which is why everyone uses it and we just sit back and accept the consequences. You can't be expected to be taken seriously if you simultaneously argue that other's shouldn't do something while yourself use it for precisely the same reasons everyone else does.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > What is it with this all-or-nothing attitude? It's indicative of a lack of respect for their users. > GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it That's certainly true. Also, that's orthogonal to the point. Being very valuable to website operators doesn't make its use any more acceptable to others.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  > Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. It's not a compromise until you consider the value of both sides of the equation. Please do elaborate on that, with some details on the negative externalities of blindly sharing your tracking data with Google. Otherwise your argument just became "superior data has got some value to me, which is more than none, so yeah I got mine". It's not less of an all-or-nothing attitude if you fail to seriously consider the other side of the supposed compromise.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

They should not use anything. Or server logs, if they really must.

mrweasel 7y ago
It seem like most people have forgotten that before Google Analytics, we all just looked at our server logs. Sure, you can't get the exact same information, but you can get enough to do capacity planning and some basic stats. I've started to wonder why people care about Google Analytics, what does it tell you that you actually need to know. Again capacity planning is useful, but other than that, isn't sort of pointless?
- mr__y 7y ago
  >exact same information you could actually get more from plain old log parsing in some cases. First of all with GA you can't access the raw data. With logs you can create new type of stats/metrics/charts and apply them on past data. Also, IIRC GA uses random sampling - only a % of connections are recorded and the data being shown is extrapolated from those samples. While I'm not arguing that given the vast amount of data at disposal, huge capacity and great engineers they can make those extrapolations very accurate, I'm not entirely convinced it is precise for (very) small traffic websites. And since a small traffic logging requires both small storage space and small processing capacity the resources needed for keeping and processing your own logs are insignificant while the results might be useful.
- duckworth 7y ago
  Some of the larger website builders/hosting , e.g. Wix don’t even give you access to server logs. Sure you can setup and run your own site and CMS easily enough, but running even hourly bulk log ingestion is usually not as straight forward and the information you can derive is very limited comparative to js based tracking. Matamo ( formerly Piwik) is decent but still takes some time to setup and get right. The main thing that the analytics tells you if you are promoting anything, is which of those promotions is actually working and driving visitors to your site.

jamil7 7y ago

Nothing? why do they need analytics?

ryanmercer 7y ago
To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... all of this lets a business know what they need to change/offer/stop to better serve their customers and attract more customers. I had a very niche ecommerce site for a couple of years, for ease I was only shipping to U.S. customers. I noticed that something like 20% of my traffic was coming from Canada so I decided to enable shipping to Canada but added a 5$ premium on top of the actual shipping cost. I had a sale to Canada the first hour of enabling it in my cart and Canada ended up being roughly 10% of my orders, even after I raised the premium/handling fee to 10$. Looking at my GA page once caused more money to be going into my pocket and filled a need for Canadian customers. I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable.
- Kovah 7y ago
  My question then would be, why do you need to use especially Google Analytics for that? Stats like "visitors per country" are a core feature of all major analytics suites. I set up analytics for many site on my job and I never experienced a use case where GA offered that specific feature no other software had.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    GA is free and takes seconds to set up. Not everyone knows how to code, not everyone is a professional web dev or CS ninja, not everyone has piles of VC money to throw at such things. GA works, is well organized, and is often integrated with a lot of cart/web builder services where you simply have to plug in a short string and pop over to the GA website. I needed a vegetable knife recently. I could have (and I do have the skills, and have made many knives over the past 25 years) purchased some appropriate steel and made one myself in 3-5 hours and had it incredibly sharp but I opted to buy a Mercer stainless steel one on Amazon for 20$~ because it required much less effort. I also couldn't care less about Google or the NSA or Lectroids from another dimension tracking me so I don't rush to go "I'd better cater to the small percentage of my potential customers that want to leave zero trace on the internet, there are countless tools out there they can use to minimize that trail of breadcrumbs. This data is usable to me and Google makes it easy" and I imagine, even the company in question was like "some people want privacy but those that are concerned can easily block this with a browser extension, in their hosts file, and/or at a hardware level so we'll go ahead and use it and save a bunch of time".

CannoloBlahnik 7y ago

I’d be using GoAccess if it meant not giving up my users to Google. Matomo is a dream.

nulbyte 7y ago

What do you mean drilling down beyond one level? I use Matomo and find it just as useful as Google Analytics. Actually, I like their interface better than Google's.

Aeolun 7y ago

Simple analytics? What would they even use the data for...

class4behavior 7y ago

There are plenty of alternative solutions: Piwik, GoatCounter, GoAccess, Open Web Analytics, clicky, Snowplow, Gauges, etc. The correct solution is to self-host all analytics involving data that can be used to identify, track, or analyze individuals.

mwexler 7y ago
And none of these offer the ease of setup, ease of analysis, or ease of recognizing what actions to take that GA offers for $0 license and no hosting fees. These on the list are all admirable (esp. Snowplow) but all assume savvy users to be able to get things that are out-of-box with GA.

tripzilch 7y ago

> don't say matomo until it supports drilling down byond one level. everybody, this is what your privacy is worth to some people.